CSBG Archive

Comic Book Legends Revealed #405

Welcome to the four hundred and fifth in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. Click here for an archive of the previous four hundred and four. This week, learn of the secret return to the X-Men titles Chris Claremont made in 1999! Discover whether Steve Ditko seriously turned down a chance to adapt Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as a comic book! Finally, what’s the deal with this Peanuts comic strip with Charlie Brown and archery?

Let’s begin!

COMIC LEGEND: Chris Claremont secretly wrote three issues of X-Men before his official return to the titles in 2000.

STATUS: True

After Steven Seagle and Joe Kelly quit writing the two main X-Men titles in 1999, the X-Franchise was in a bit of a bind. Alan Davis had recently been brought in by his old friend and collaborator Chris Claremont to have a short run as the penciler on one of the X-Men titles and he recalled in his Modern Masters volume about how the penciling gig grew into something more…

Only a few weeks after beginning penciling, Mark Powers phoned and said Joe Kelly and Steven Seagle had quit, and asked if I’d help out by plotting the next issue. I said I would and sent a plot in. Mark phoned and said they really liked the plot and would I plot Uncanny as well? So I said okay and it was “can you plot next month’s as well?” [laughter] I’d said there was no way I could manage to do the dialogue, so I just continued penciling one and plotting both X-Men titles and suddenly 18 months have passed and I’ve penciled 11 issues and plotted 24 or more.

Davis’ run was an interesting arrangement, as it seemed almost destined to be a placeholder run. He described the time as:

In that instance, however Mark Powers gave me lists of characters and events that had to be introduced or resolved to tie in with other titles. It was complicated because the other writers and editors didn’t want to play ball. It got very messy. Working on X-Men was my most “professional” writing, in that I was problem-solving rather than coming up with ideas that I would have chosen.

In any event, Davis worked with a few different scripters over his plots. Mostly, Terry Kavanagh (Davis’ old editor on Excalibur) did the scripts…

but so did Jay Faerber…

Interestingly, though, X-Men #95-96 and Uncanny X-Men #379 all have credits for ONLY Alan Davis…

This is because these issues were secretly scripted by Chris Claremont, in his return to the X-Men titles a little bit before he officially returned with X-Men #100 and Uncanny X-Men #381. This information was confirmed in 2009 in the Official Index to the Marvel Universe.

COMIC LEGEND: Marvel tried to do a comic book adaptation of Atlas Shrugged in the early 1990s with Steve Ditko doing the adaptation!

STATUS: True

Reader Jason C. wrote in a couple of years ago to ask whether the following statement was true:

Despite being strongly influenced by the writings of Ayn Rand Steve Ditko was once offered a chance to work on an adaptation of Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged by turned it down.

Oddly enough, Jason, that’s exactly what happened!

Atlas Shrugged, of course, is the famed final novel from Ayn Rand, founder of the philosophical movement known as “Objectivism,” which legendary comic book artist Steve Ditko was/is a follower of.

Former Marvel editor Mort Todd discussed what could have been on the Ditkomania group at Yahoo! in response to someone noting that Ditko had turned down the chance to do a comic book adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead:

In fact, it was Atlas Shrugged. When I was an Editor at Marvel [which was during the 1990s – BC], I got them to approve a 4 issue graphic novel series (though I wanted to do a 44 issue Akira-style adaptation). The Rand Estate was cool with it as long as Ditko would draw it and I was going to get John Severin to ink it. Steve declined and I think the world lost out on a masterpiece!

As it turned out, Ditko felt that he did not wish to be the one who actually came up with the visualizations of characters heretofore only visualized within the reader’s mind. I suppose he found it too presumptuous?

In any event, we missed out on what certainly would have been at the very least an interesting collaboration between two of the more notable pop culture figures of the 20th Century!

Thanks to Jason for the question and thanks to Mort Todd for the information!

COMIC LEGEND: There is a notable Peanuts strip where Charlie Brown shoots arrows and then draws targets around wherever they land, making it look like he was dead on each time.

STATUS: False

It really is fascinating how some of these stories become so ingrained in the public consciousness.

Here’s a sampling of different articles all citing the same comic strip:

A Peanuts cartoon once depicted Charlie Brown practicing archery in his back yard. Target after target had been drawn on the wooden fence. Each one had a whole in the bull’s-eye where Charlie Brown had shot an arrow. Lucy stops by and wants Charlie Brown to demonstrate his skills. To her surprise, Charlie took the arrow, placed it on his bow and fired it into the fence, not anywhere near a target. He then proceeded to draw a target around the arrow. Lucy could not help but question, “Charlie Brown, what are you doing?” Without any embarrassment he answered, “I’m making sure I never miss.”

Unfortunately that approach is often taken in ministry. Programs are launched and if anything is accomplished we are quickly claim to have reached the intended goal. Much energy, time, and resources are wasted when we fail to aim at a specific target.

A Peanuts cartoon had Charlie Brown shooting his new bow and arrow. Each time he shot it; he would run to the fence and draw a bull’s eye around the arrow. Lucy saw what he was doing and informed him that he was not doing it correctly. His reply to her was, “It works. I always hit the target.” Many people are like Charlie Brown. They are shooting their arrows into the air and drawing a bull’s eye around wherever they land. They operate under the old idiom, “If you aim for nothing you will hit it every time.” The problem with this philosophy is that it accomplishes little and it leaves the individual feeling empty and unfulfilled.

People who know their God-given purpose are determined to hit the target God has set for them. This point reminds me of a Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown was practicing his archery. In addition to his bow and arrow, Charlie Brown took a paintbrush and a bucket of paint along.

Pulling an arrow from his quiver, he drew the string back firmly and let it slide from his fingers, hurling the arrow toward its destination. Approaching the target with his bucket of paint in tow, Charlie Brown drew a bull’s eye around the arrow.

Frustrated by this nonsense, Lucy asked Charlie what he was doing. Charlie Brown answered, “This way I ensure I always hit my target.”

Sadly, this is the way many Christians live their lives. Wherever the arrows of life happen to land, they claim, was their destination all along!

Al Pascale thinks that it derives from the following passage in John Maxwell’s book “The Winning
Attitude”

One day Charlie Brown was in his back yard having target practice with his bow and arrow. He would pull the bow string back and let the arrow fly into a fence. Then he would go to where the arrow had landed and draw a target around it. Several arrows and targets later, Lucy said, “You don’t do target practice that way. You draw the target, then shoot the arrow.” Charlie’s response: “I know that, but if you do it my way, you never miss!”

While Maxwell never actually says there was a strip, I tend to think he’s just doing the same as the above writers and referencing what he thinks WAS an actual strip, but I could be wrong.

Either way, the strip never existed!

Thanks to Derrick Bang for the Brother Juniper connection! Thanks to Al Pascale for his theory!
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!

Here’s my new book, Why Does Batman Carry Shark Repellent? The cover is by Kevin Hopgood (the fellow who designed War Machine’s armor).

If you want to order a copy, ordering it here gives me a referral fee.

Follow Comics Should Be Good on Twitter and on Facebook (also, feel free to share Comic Book Legends Revealed on our Facebook page!). If we hit 3,000 likes on Facebook you’ll get a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends the week after we hit 3,000 likes! So go like us on Facebook to get that extra Comic Book Legends Revealed! Not only will you get updates when new blog posts show up on both Twitter and Facebook, but you’ll get original content from me, as well!

Also, be sure to check out my website, Urban Legends Revealed, where I look into urban legends about the worlds of entertainment and sports, which you can find here, at urbanlegendsrevealed.com.

Here’s my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends – half of them are re-worked classic legends I’ve featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).

The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it…(click to enlarge)…

If you’d like to order it, you can use the following code if you’d like to send me a bit of a referral fee…

Omar Karindu

– The Charlie Brown anecdote, or a variant thereof featuring a Texas sharpshooter” who does something similar, is used in epidemiology instruction as an allegory for a research error. The “Texas sharpshooter fallacy” is meant to warn students away from finding population patterns in genuinely unrelated instances of a disease by arbitrarily selecting a geographic range.

— Nothing like a mention of Ayn Rand to provoke a civil, intelligent discussion free of exaggerations and name-calling on both sides.

cool arrow

DanLarkin

I think Ayn Rand’s views are repellent, and Atlas Shrugged is a horribly written book, but there’s no way a Ditko/ Severin adaptation wouldn’t have been awesome. Batshit insane, but awesome, nonetheless.

Plenty of hardcore socialist hellholes around the world for you to move to. Please do that instead of advocating turning decent countries into them.

there are no “objectivist” countries, actually– at least none with functioning economies. As a philosophy, objectivism is not taken very seriously in university philosophy or political science departments– and even the most prominent disciple of objectivism, Alan Greenspan, was very forthcoming that it was attempting to hem close to Rand’s objectivist principles is precisely what caused the economic crash in 2008.

fraser

Purely for the help of it, I’m now envisioning a super-hero whose identity is self-made millionaire Rand Marx. By day, he collects wealth. By night, he distributes to the needy posing as a Robin Hood-type villain … wait, Lois Lane already did that one?
I wonder if someone at some point simply attributed the Brother Juniper gag to the more famous strip? It happens with a lot of “he didn’t say that’s” and Internet memes.
I’m not sure if this is quite an Internet legend as I don’t have a specific source (but I know I’ve read it once or twice) but I’ve often heard Ditko the Objectivist credited for Marvel having so many Communist villains in the early sixties. Except that doesn’t make sense as they all seem to turn up in books not drawn or co-plotted by Ditko (Iron Man, most notably, but also a lot of Avengers). So was it Stan? Jack? Or who?

I’ve often heard Ditko the Objectivist credited for Marvel having so many Communist villains in the early sixties. Except that doesn’t make sense as they all seem to turn up in books not drawn or co-plotted by Ditko (Iron Man, most notably, but also a lot of Avengers). So was it Stan? Jack? Or who?

Because of the rhetoric that gets thrown around these days (and maybe back then as well) people forget that communism and liberalism are very different ideologies. Back in the 1960s, few doubted that liberals like Stan Lee and (and presumedly also Jack Kirby) could be anti-Communist as well.

Liberals and libertarians (like Randian objectivists) might define freedom very differently, but both their conceptions of freedom are incompatible with Soviet-style communism.

I think it would have been cool if Jack Kirby adapted Atlas Shrugged like he did with 2001: A Space odyssey. He’d wrap up the original story in no time at all then introduce his own crazy characters like some kind of Randian version of Machine Man.

Wraith

(I read about 85% of it but could not bring myself to slog through every word of the two jesus-weepingly tedious John Galt speeches, and this was back when I considered myself an Objectivist and a devout admirer of Rand; the woman did. not. know. when. to. stop belaboring a point.)

fraser

Wraith, my wife is a fan of the books and she doesn’t know anyone who slugged through those speeches.
Ian, good point–though in practice a lot of people did equate liberals and communists (causing many liberals in the fifties to adopt anti-communism in self-defense). It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Jack or Stan were the source, but I was curious if anyone knows for sure.

I’ve read two of Ayn Rand’s books and I am not really a fan of her work. Political stance aside, I don’t think she was that great of a writer, but she hit some nerves with a specific niche of readers and has maintained a following. Good for her. Until we find out that Ayn Rand secretly drew splash pages of the Thing battling the Hulk, I just don’t care that much about her.

joshschr

I read Atlas Shrugged cover to cover. It didn’t change my life or anything, but I don’t regret it. It seemed like it simplified people a little too much to hang a whole philosophy of life on. I will eventually get around to reading the Fountainhead, but at the rate I’m going I’ll probably watch the film version first.

Shamus

I really think the world is fine without a graphic novel interpretation of Atlas Shrugged. It’s a dull work to begin with. It’s more of an ideological treatise dressed up as a story than a true piece of literature. Thanks but no thanks. And it’s okay to discuss politics if everyone is respectful of each other. Unfortunately that’s where things tend to fall apart.

Alex

I read tons of Claremonts X-Men stuff during the last few years of his run and eventually realized how much of his stuff I didn’t read as he writes so much dialogue and word balloons. It also takes him a long time to get situated on a book as evidence in his Fantastic Four run. It was just getting good and he had to leave to do his return to the X-Men.

To be a Rand groupie is to flaunt your immaturity, your ignorance, your desperation to justify greed or your lack of international travel. It is, in other words, to admit your blindness to how so much of the world already lives, and to ignore what America would look like if “Fountainhead Shrugged” was seen as a public policy manual rather than what it really is: a dangerous farce.

Eric Henry

There were quite a number of archery themed strips in the early Peanuts, so the mistake is understandable. Perhaps someone saw the Brother Juniper gag, mis-remembered it as Peanuts strip and the mistake has been perpetrated from there.

Charle Brown’s interest in archery (like his obsession with Davy Crockett) disappeared after the early days of the strip.

Travis Pelkie

Daniel R

One’s “lack of international travel” needs to be justified? I know this is becoming more and more common, but this equating tourism with broad-mindedness is really a particularly annoying brand of snobbery.

A Horde of Evil Hipsters

“equating tourism with broad-mindedness is really a particularly annoying brand of snobbery”

More annoying than this ridiculous “greed is good, poor people should die, I was born rich so fuck everyone else, I don’t know what socialism means but I hate because the TV tells me to” brand of snobbery?

A Ditko Atlas Shrugged would have been brilliant. I have no idea why every time Ayn Rand is mentioned people have to fill the comments with unnecessary politics: her novels are fictional – that’s what novels are. It’s not like I believe it’s right for people to be possessed and kill their teachers, but I’m still going to read (and probably enjoy) Uncanny X-Men #1. I feel the John Maxwell origin of the Charlie Brown and Lucy story was definitely just Maxwell using their names allegorically to make the point of his parable. He could have equally called the characters Clark and Lois or Jack and Jill.

Omar Karindu

Marc C.

Drancon—if novels are only fictional (I take what you say to mean–not real, what is the big deal, just words and ideas—fictional)–then why are you reading them? Has a novel ever changed your thinking? Expanded it in any way? Well, is it not possible that an act of reading can also narrow your worldview? Read all the Rand you want, but when so many Politicians profess the gospel of Rand and Objectivism I can no longer think her work “just fiction.” The people who destroyed our economy clung to Rand’s philosophy even as they were managing the world economy into the toilet (Alan Greenspan, the Chicago school and ilk). Rand, for me, is just another L Ron Hubbard. Lousy writers who did better founding quasi-religious movements.

David A. Spitzley

Saying Rand’s books are just fiction is equivalent to saying Marx’s writings are just political philosophy. Personally, I think they both found a couple of worthwhile insights and then drove off into crazytown. Neither atomic individualism nor universal collectivism is likely to work very well due purely to economic considerations, market failures on the one hand and non-market inefficiencies on the other, much less the reality of humans being by turns considerably more sympathetic, more selfish, and wackier than either theory considers. Why anybody commits to either theory is beyond me.

fraser

There were also a spate of early Peanuts strips where the kids were playing golf. And jump rope was Lucy’s big shtick for a bit. And then he got to baseball and the annual Charlie Brown/Lucy football kick–one of the interesting things about reading the early ones is seeing Schultz try to figure out where he was going.

ParanoidObsessive

Because of the rhetoric that gets thrown around these days (and maybe back then as well) people forget that communism and liberalism are very different ideologies. Back in the 1960s, few doubted that liberals like Stan Lee and (and presumedly also Jack Kirby) could be anti-Communist as well.

Even beyond that, people forget that in the early 60’s, there was still a significant amount of patriotism and nationalism in the US, on both sides of the political spectrum (it was the later years of Vietnam that really amped up our cynicism and turned us more into a “the people versus government ” as opposed to a “the people supporting government” sort of culture). It’s perfectly understandable that even relatively “Left”-leaning people of the time would still be opposed to “dirty Soviets” and “heathen Chinese” or whathaveyou (especially since the hippy movement really wouldn’t take off until the end of the decade).

If you look at Marvel’s “communist” villains, they were rarely home-grown socialists or reformers as much as they were always agents of foreign powers. Something very much in tune with the Cold War era mentality that certain nations were absolutely “THE ENEMY” (and many of those were Communist, sooooo…).

I don’t think there was ever an ideological agenda there (conscious or otherwise), as much as the fact that people were writing what they knew, for people they wanted to buy it. They weren’t trying to change the world or inspire ideas, they were mainly just writing funnybooks for kids.

As for Kirby’s political leanings, the fact that he was already in his mid-40’s when Marvel started implies he might not have been as sympathetic to some of the more radical elements and ways of thinking that blossomed in the 60’s, even if his art style and writing DID seem to lend itself very well to that sort of subculture. But trying to guess what his politics were is sort of fruitless unless we think he was actively trying to present them in his work, which I would say he absolutely wasn’t.

@Marc C – millions more politicians preach from the Old Testament, which has clearly resulted in far worse outcomes than Atlas Shrugged, but if this had been an article on an artist doing a comic book adaptation of Genesis, the comments wouldn’t be inundated with people using it as their personal soapbox about it doing “a number on our world”. You’re not writing about the text, you’re writing about your personal feelings on something peripheral to it. There is no way that a Ditko imagining of Galt’s Gulch from Atlas Shrugged would have been anything but awesome.

fraser

I don’t know about no ideological agenda, Paranoid–Stan (or whoever really wrote the lettercols) said more than once that Communism is Bad and they wanted to spread that message. And, of course we got a fair amount of speechifying in stories over the years warning us of the Terrible Threat.
While I don’t know what Kirby’s views were, his Forever People seemed much more sympathetic to the hippie movement (albeit New God hippies) than a lot of his contemporaries.

Ned Tugent

Two novels can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other involves orcs.

Jeff Nettleton

I’m not certain if Mark Evanier said it or just repeated it, or I just mis-remember his involvement; but, it was said that Stan was “…too conservative for Kirby and too liberal for Ditko…” I believe Evanier said that Kirby had a deep distrust and hatred of Nixon and his ilk and he always struck me as an old school New Deal Democrat. At the same time, he didn’t see much difference between Hitler and Stalin; a bully is a bully and Kirby hated bullies. When Stan didn’t have a Kirby or Ditko to bounce ideas off of, he would get lazy and revert to Commies as villains. If it had been earlier, I’m sure he would have done it with the Nazis. Stan has never struck me as a particularly political animal and Jack was too busy working to have too much involvement. As for the Forever People, Kirby had respect for the idealism of some of the young people he met (who inspired the characters) but I suspect he was disappointed that they seemed to lose a lot of that idealism under the weight of life. Ditko, who knows? I think if you took Rand out of the equation, Ditko would still be an enigma.

Joe Maggio

deron

I don’t think that Ditko would have been an especially good choice for an adaptation for [i]Atlas Shrugged[/i]; his characters are so rubbery and fluid, whereas Rand’s writing and thought was anything but. On the other hand, I am not overly fond of Ditko under the best of circumstances (and outright antagonistic to Rand and her atrocious attempts at philosophy), so I wouldn’t be the book’s market anyway.

millions more politicians preach from the Old Testament, which has clearly resulted in far worse outcomes than Atlas Shrugged, but if this had been an article on an artist doing a comic book adaptation of Genesis, the comments wouldn’t be inundated with people using it as their personal soapbox about it doing “a number on our world”

The difference is that even an open-minded agnostic or atheist recognizes that the Tanakh has inspired a great variety of religious and moral perspectives as well as being a foundational work of world literature– certainly if one wants to understand the literary and intellectual history of the west, the Bible is one of those essential works.

TJCoolguy

Not to add tinder to the political fire or anything, but I always find it interesting to look back at Rand’s work with a child’s eye. Until I was an adult, I had no idea that her books were based on any kind of political ideal. I just knew them as those boring, dense books that a teacher would occasionally try to get me to read.

I would usually get about three pages in before being like, “What the hell is anybody even talking about in this book?”

Live Free!

Marc C. the Free Market is what has driven our progress. even a bad Free Market system is better than any other system. the Free Market didnt do a number on our world, government intererence in the Free Market is what caused the bubbles and downturns.

Live Free!

Marc C. , first of all, our economy is not destroyed. Allan Greenspan proves my point, government interference in the market is the problem. his actions at the Fed contributed to our downturn but it certainly wasnt the only factor. social engineering thru economic policies was another factor. Greenspan’s main mistake was keeping interest rates to low after the economy stabilized after 911. rates should be always on the low side and especially when the economy is struggling, but after the economy recovers, rates should rise. to much cheap money causes bubbles.

Live Free!

socialism is control, it forces people who dont believe in it to be a part of it, where as free market capitalism is a choice, you do not have to participate. you can say that choice isnt always ‘fair’ but its still a choice.

I thought Rand was an overly-wordy author who, as stated above, did not know when to quit belaboring a point. As such, a graphic novel adaptation of “Atlas Shrugged” would have been the *perfect* vehicle for distilling the essence of the story and concept into something more concentrated (much the way that the sienkiewicz version of “Moby Dick” actually makes that ponderous thing readable) – the pictures are worth 1000 words *each*, and that would have improved the story.

As for her ideas, they’re an interesting thought experiment, and do make a point worth remembering, but a lot of folks seem to think that they were delivered on stone tablets around burning bushes and the like. They’re ideas- worth a good discussion, but no more, no less.

TJCoolguy

David: That’s actually a really good point. In the graphic medium, it would probably be a lot more readable.

Damn, now I kinda wish it would have happened. It would be interesting to finally be able to absorb the story (or stories, if they would have eventually moved on to the other as well) that, for better or for worse depending on individual opinion, has had such an effect on the world.

Atlas Shrugged (which I’ve read, all 1500 pages) has to be the least visual book ever. A train wrecks, a woman jumps off a bridge – and that’s about it. The rest is people talking. And talking and talking and talking and…

For those interested, The Fountainhead is a good (and not too long ) read that makes a good point: Art must not be compromised, or it fails.

Unfortunately, Rand took that small art-related concept and stretched it WAYYYYYY past the breaking point in Atlas Shrugged, which is why the book, and Objectiveism, fails.

The shoot-an-arrow gag has probably appeared a lot of places over the years. The first time I saw it was in a 1-page Felix The Cat comic book strip circa 1958. As I recall it, someone makes a disparaging comment to Felix that he ‘couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn’. So Felix finds a barn, shoots an arrow at it, and then draws a bullseye around the arrow.

(Unfortunately the Grand Comics Database doesn’t list the contents of the Felix comics from that time period, so I can’t identify exactly which issue it appeared in. Might be as early as 1957, might be as late as 1959. But since the Father Juniper strip didn’t start until 1958 the use of the gag in Felix probably predates the use of the gag in FJ.)

M-Wolverine

Funny that wordy Claremont and Rand are in the same column. I mean, did we really need Kitty to say “We can see Death’s face!” “It’s Wolverine!” I mean, can’t the art ever just tell us the story? (Reaction shot; then probably the most distinctive comic book unmasked head out there).

[…] villains and a seemingly directionless mess in both X-Men and Uncanny (I also recently found out he secretly wrote 3 issue with Alan Davis just before his return). Claremont was thankfully moved off X-Men after a short time to his own new series, X-treme X-Men, […]